Grass-Fed Gas

Opponents of industrialized agriculture have been
declaring for over a decade that how humans produce animal products is one
of the most important environmental questions we face. We need a bolder
declaration. After all, it’s not how we produce animal products that
ultimately matters. It’s whether we produce them at all.

Here’s a copy of my New York Times article on
grass-fed beef, which ran in April 2012. It’s a distillation from research
I’m doing for my book Modern Savage. In a chapter that I recently finished,
I demonstrate how the logistics of grass-fed farming won’t even work to
ensure this method’s status as niche approach, much less a standard
alternative, to raising cattle for food.

April 12, 2012

The industrial production of animal products is nasty
business. From mad cow, E. coli and salmonella to soil erosion, manure
runoff and pink slime, factory farming is the epitome of a broken food
system.

There have been various responses to these horrors, including some
recent attempts to improve the industrial system, like the announcement this
week that farmers will have to seek prescriptions for sick animalsinstead of
regularly feeding antibiotics to all stock. My personal reaction has been to
avoid animal products completely. But most people upset by factory farming
have turned instead to meat, dairy and eggs from nonindustrial sources.
Indeed, the last decade has seen an exciting surge in grass-fed, free-range,
cage-free and pastured options. These alternatives typically come from small
organic farms, which practice more humane methods of production. They appeal
to consumers not only because they reject the industrial model, but because
they appear to be more in tune with natural processes.

For all the strengths
of these alternatives, however, they’re ultimately a poor substitute for
industrial production. Although these smaller systems appear to be
environmentally sustainable, considerable evidence suggests
otherwise.

Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed
cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global
warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all
the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle
would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the
country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken
and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of
the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about
this is sustainable.

Advocates of small-scale, nonindustrial alternatives say
their choice is at least more natural. Again, this is a dubious claim. Many
farmers who raise chickens on pasture use industrial breeds that have been
bred to do one thing well: fatten quickly in confinement. As a result, they
can suffer painful leg injuries after several weeks of living a “natural”
life pecking around a large pasture. Free-range pigs are routinely affixed
with nose rings to prevent them from rooting, which is one of their most
basic instincts. In essence, what we see as natural doesn’t necessarily
conform to what is natural from the animals’ perspectives.

The economics of
alternative animal systems are similarly problematic. Subsidies
notwithstanding, the unfortunate reality of commodifying animals is that
confinement pays. If the production of meat and dairy was somehow
decentralized into small free-range operations, common economic sense
suggests that it wouldn’t last. These businesses — no matter how virtuous in
intention — would gradually seek a larger market share, cutting corners,
increasing stocking density and aiming to fatten animals faster than
competitors could. Barring the strictest regulations, it wouldn’t take long
for production systems to scale back up to where they started.

All this said,
committed advocates of alternative systems make one undeniably important
point about the practice called “rotational grazing” or “holistic farming”:
the soil absorbs the nutrients from the animals’ manure, allowing grass and
other crops to grow without the addition of synthetic fertilizer. As Michael
Pollan writes, “It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable
agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients.” In other words, raising
animals is not only sustainable, but required.

But rotational grazing works
better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of
nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows’ grazing lands
with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we
learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of
imported corn and soy feed. This common practice is an economic necessity.
Still, if a farmer isn’t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the
soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby
undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling.

Finally, there is no avoiding
the fact that the nutrient cycle is interrupted every time a farmer steps in
and slaughters a perfectly healthy manure-generating animal, something that
is done before animals live a quarter of their natural lives. When consumers
break the nutrient cycle to eat animals, nutrients leave the system of
rotationally grazed plots of land (though of course this happens with
plant-based systems as well). They land in sewer systems and septic tanks
(in the form of human waste) and in landfills and rendering plants (in the
form of animal carcasses).

Farmers could avoid this waste by exploiting
animals only for their manure, allowing them to live out the entirety of
their lives on the farm, all the while doing their own breeding and growing
of feed. But they’d better have a trust fund.

Opponents of industrialized
agriculture have been declaring for over a decade that how humans produce
animal products is one of the most important environmental questions we
face. We need a bolder declaration. After all, it’s not how we produce
animal products that ultimately matters. It’s whether we produce them at
all.

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